Verbs Quotes - Page 8

And what is a kiss, specifically? A pledge properly sealed, a promise seasoned to taste, a vow stamped with the immediacy of a lip, a rosy circle drawn around the verb 'to love.' A kiss is a message too intimate for the ear, infinity captured in the bee's brief visit to a flower, secular communication with an aftertaste of heaven, the pulse rising from the heart to utter its name on a lover's lip: 'Forever.

Edmond Rostand

Love, Flower, Communication

Edmond Rostand (1995). “Cyrano de Bergerac”, Talonbooks Limited

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There are but two future verbs which man may appropriate confidently and without pride: "I shall suffer," and "I shall die.

Sophie Swetchine

Pride, Destiny, Men

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The verb "Garland" should be created. It would mean to unfairly put a stinking albatross around someone's neck, to make him unemployable.

Gene Weingarten

Mean, Albatross, Necks

Source: live.washingtonpost.com

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The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.

William Zinsser

Writing, Long, Secret

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Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.

Clive James

Water, Ponds, Tails

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The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Creativity, Self, Play

Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.52, Penguin

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Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.

Janet Fitch

Running, Writing, People

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If love is truly a verb, if help is a verb, if forgiveness is a verb, if kindness is a verb, then you can do something about it.

Betty Eadie

Kindness, Love Is, Acting

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The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.

Victor Hugo

Wisdom

Contemplations bk. 1, no. 8 (1856)

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You see, in our family we don't know whether we're coming or going - it's all my grandmother's fault. But, of course, the fault wasn't hers at all: it lay in language. Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement.

Amitav Ghosh

Grandmother, Journey, Going Away

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Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is an on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you're going but going anyway. A journey without maps. Tillich says that doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

Frederick Buechner

Faith, Journey, Opposites

Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.109, Zondervan

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Happiness is not a noun or a verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.

Eric Weiner

Tissues, Nouns, Conjunctions

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Don't you DARE use party as a verb in my shop

Dylan Moran

Funny, Party, Humor

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Love is a verb and verbs show action

Mr. T

Love Is, Action, Shows

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He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphis sweat and struggle; the

H. G. Wells

Struggle, Sweat, Splits

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The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Douglas Hofstadter

Communication, Long, Example

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid". Book by Douglas Hofstadter, 1979.

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...Although, as the Latin verb to educate, educate, indicates, it is not a question of putting something in but drawing it out, if it is there to begin with...I want all of my students and all of my dancers to be aware of the poignancy of life at that moment. I would like to feel that I had, in some way, given them the gift of themselves.

Martha Graham

Latin, Teaching, Drawing

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A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exit in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one, things in motion, motion in things.

Ernest Fenollosa

Eye, Cutting, Doe

Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Jonathan Stalling, Lucas Klein (2008). “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition”, p.82, Fordham Univ Press

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And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? - because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security, relationship has a certainty. Relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say good-bye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.

Rajneesh

Relationship, Morning, Insecure

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...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.

Pat Metheny

Musical, Jazz And Life, Process

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Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Gretel Ehrlich

Seasons

Gretel Ehrlich (1986). “The Solace of Open Spaces”, Penguin Group USA

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We come to the New Testament, where again a host of imperative verbs is mustered in support of that miserable bondage of free-choice, and the aid of carnal Reason with her inferences and similes is called in, just as in a picture or a dream you might see the King of the flies with his lances of straw and shields of hay arrayed against a real and regular army of seasoned human troops. That is how the human dreams of Diatribe go to war with the battalions of divine words.

Martin Luther

Dream, Kings, Real

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There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Charles Baudelaire

Practice, Sorcery, Sacred

"L'art romantique". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1869.

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I am a verb. I am that I amNouns exist because there is a created universe and physical reality, but if the universe is only a mass of nouns, it is dead. Unless 'I am', there are no verbs, and verbs are what makes the universe alive

William P. Young

Reality, Alive, Nouns

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There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort - things which are always inside of us and in fact are us and which consequently will not be pushed off or away where we can begin thinking about them - are no longer things; they, and the us which they are, equals A Verb; an IS.

e. e. cummings

Life, Believe, Simple

E.E. Cummings (2015). “The Enormous Room”, p.162, Xist Publishing

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